Disasters Much Bigger than San Bernardino: What Candidates Need to Talk about

Some candidates including Trump and Cruz support the right of Americans to own effective tools of self defense. But none are talking about the long-standing official government stance of keeping Americans as vulnerable hostages to nuclear weapons.

It is terrible that Americans can get shot at a Christmas party, but much worse will happen if we don’t confront the problems beginning at the top.

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After every shooting episode the response is the same formula: constant media coverage, much of it fact-free, and calls for thoughts, prayers—and still more gun control. It’s time to take a broader perspective than a focus on the dozens of individual tragedies.

Today, Americans are targets. Not just individual Americans, but also the United States of America. They are targeted by deranged individuals, by fanatical ideologues, by drug cartels, by terrorist organizations, and by foreign powers, some of whom have intercontinental ballistic missiles with multiple independently targeted nuclear warheads aimed at American cities.

Our thoughts need to turn to what is really going on, and our prayers need to include “God save the United States of America.”

We have pervasive surveillance of our financial transactions, our telephone and electronic communications, our medical records, and our movements. The government has enormous powers of search and seizure, many unthinkable to drafters of our Fourth Amendment, and these are used against Americans engaged in normal business that threatens no one. We already have lots of gun control laws.

So how were terrorists in San Bernadino able to accumulate bomb-making material, an arsenal of weapons both legal and illegal, and body armor, without spurring any action by the authorities?

Terrorists have also engaged in operations that don’t yet have any poster children but that are far more dangerous than shooting up a Christmas party, such as disabling a key electrical substation. This shows the capacity for coordinated, sophisticate operations that could cripple the electricity grid for a long time.

Candidates such as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz call for controlling illegal immigration—surely necessary, but insufficient. The San Bernardino terrorists were here legally.

Here are the real issues that we need to discuss:

Americans are mostly helpless victims. The government that is supposed to protect us, though awesomely powerful, appears to be incompetent, corrupt, or—dare we suggest it?—on the other side.Americans are divided by a culture of grievances.America is dangerously weak.Foreign policy is recklessly provocative.

Some candidates including Trump and Cruz support the right of Americans to own effective tools of self defense. But none are talking about the long-standing official government stance of keeping Americans as vulnerable hostages to nuclear weapons. Rudimentary civil defense was dismantled long ago; Americans don’t even know to drop and cover if they see a bright flash. Nuclear terrorism—the belief that the negligible dose of radiation that alarms the haz-mat teams’ monitors spells doom. The civil defense instruments appropriate to a war environment were discarded and not replaced.

It was a long time before the FBI was permitted to use the word “terrorism,” though everyone knew was involved in San Bernardino. We are crippled by political correctness—thank you, Mr. Trump, for saying so. The President won’t even name the enemy. We surely need to vet refugees—but even more so the State Department, the Department of Justice, and law enforcement agencies, for believers in jihad; connections with foreign governments; or bribe-takers from the drug trade, organized crime, crony capitalists, or non-governmental organizations including radical environmentalists.

Americans are being indoctrinated from grade school in the culture of collective guilt instead of individual responsibility. They are supposed to be either entitled victims or guilt-ridden “oppressors.” Thank you, Dr. Carson, for addressing this racial divisiveness. Endless revenge and “reparations” for the sins of great-great-great-grandfathers means endless war, both here and in the Middle East.

When Trump calls for “making America great again,” it’s an admission that America is no longer great. Our military, our industry, our currency are being destroyed by taxation, regulation, litigation, reckless spending—and abandonment of the virtues, morality, and faith of our Founders.

And what is our foreign policy, really? Thank you, Dr. Paul, for asking questions about creating grievances. Who is pointing out that the U.S. and Russia are fighting a war in Syria, on opposite sides, and that a Russian warplane was downed by a NATO member, possibly with a U.S.-made weapon? Exactly why does “Assad have to go,” and who are we to decide? Was our government running guns to ISIS from Benghazi, Mrs. Clinton?

It is terrible that Americans can get shot at a Christmas party, but much worse will happen if we don’t confront the problems beginning at the top.

“From leaks, we knew quite a bit about the agreement, but in chapter after chapter, the final text is worse than we expected with the demands of the 500 official U.S. trade advisers representing corporate interests satisfied to the detriment of the public interest,”

Today’s long-awaited release of the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) reveals that the pact replicates many of the most controversial terms of past pacts that promote job offshoring and push down U.S wages. “From leaks, we knew quite a bit about the agreement, but in chapter after chapter, the final text is worse than we expected with the demands of the 500 official U.S. trade advisers representing corporate interests satisfied to the detriment of the public interest,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s GTW.

This article was first published April 2, 2013.
One of the least discussed and least reported issues is the Obama administration’s effort to bring the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement to the forefront, an oppressive plurilateral US-led free trade agreement currently being negotiated with several Pacific Rim countries.

Six hundred US corporate advisors have negotiated and had input into the TPP, and the proposed draft text has not been made available to the public, the press or policymakers. The level of secrecy surrounding the agreements is unparalleled – paramilitary teams scatter outside the premise of each round of discussions while helicopters loom overhead – media outlets impose a near-total blackout of reportage on the subject and US Senator Ron Wyden, the Chair of the Congressional Committee with jurisdiction over TPP, was denied access to the negotiation texts. “The majority of Congress is being kept in the dark as to the substance of the TPP negotiations, while representatives of U.S. corporations — like Halliburton, Chevron, PhaRMA, Comcast and the Motion

Picture Association of America -are being consulted and made privy to details of the agreement,” said Wyden, in a floor statement to Congress.
In addition to the United States, the countries participating in the negotiations include Australia, Brunei, Chile, Canada, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. Japan has expressed its desire to become a negotiating partner, but not yet joined negotiation, partly due to public pressure to steer-clear.
The TPP would impose punishing regulations that give multinational corporations unprecedented rights to demand taxpayer compensation for policies they think will undermine their expected future profits straight from the treasuries of participating nations – it would push the agenda of Big PhaRMA in the developing world to impose longer monopoly controls on drugs, drastically limiting access to affordable generic medications that people depend on. The TPP would undermine food safety by limiting labeling and forcing countries like the United States to import food that fails to meet its national safety standards, in addition to banning Buy America or Buy Local preferences.

According to leaked draft texts, the TPP would also impose investor protections that incentivize offshoring jobs through special benefits for companies – the TPP stifles innovation by requiring internet service providers to police user-activity and treat small-scale individual downloads as large-scale for-profit violators. Most predictably, it would rollback regulation of finance capital predators on Wall Street by prohibiting bans on risky financial services and preventing signatory nations from exercising the ability to independently pursue monetary policy and issue capital controls – signatories must permit the free flow of derivatives, currency speculation and other manipulative financial instruments. The US-led partnership – which seeks to impose ‘Shock and Awe’